


Freefall

by AgentMaryMargaretSkitz, IncendiaGlacies



Series: Legends of S.H.I.E.L.D [6]
Category: DC's Legends of Tomorrow (TV)
Genre: Agents of Shield AU, Episode: s01e06 FZZT, Near Death Experiences
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-06
Updated: 2018-04-06
Packaged: 2019-04-19 08:43:19
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,122
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14233563
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AgentMaryMargaretSkitz/pseuds/AgentMaryMargaretSkitz, https://archiveofourown.org/users/IncendiaGlacies/pseuds/IncendiaGlacies
Summary: Based on AoS 1x06 FZZTGideon's team investigates a series of mysterious deaths only to have one of their own infected.





	Freefall

**Author's Note:**

> We're so excited to post this episode. This has been something we've been squealing about for weeks and now it's all ready for you guys! Hopefully you enjoy it and get some feelings!

“Okay, time’s up, ma’am,” Lily said as the timer on her tablet hit zero. “You can slow back down now.”

Gideon nodded and reached out a hand to slow the treadmill. As she came to a stop, Lily passed her a towel to wipe down with.

“Vitals are all normal,” Lily reported, showing her the results on the table. “And you’ve worked up quite a good sweat.”

“I don’t sweat,” Gideon replied. “I glisten.”

The scientist smiled a little at the crack. “All that’s left is to take some blood.”

“Let’s do it then,” her superior nodded. “Get this all over with.”

“You do realize your records show you aren’t due for a physical anytime soon, right?” Lily told her. “Why the need for all of this now?”

“Physical therapist’s orders,” Gideon grumbled. “Got a call for a check in and said I felt a little off. Next thing I know, I’m ordered to get all this done.”

“Better safe than sorry,” Lily nodded. “I heard what happened in New York. We’d hate to lose you now after you came back from the great beyond.”

“Thank you. Now, shall we get that blood sample?”

“If we have to,” Gideon grumbled. “But you should know that I’m not a fan of getting poked.”

* * *

 

“An ounce?”

“Yes,” Nate nodded as he set the Icer down. “One ounce too much. It’s the difference between success and failure. When you have to make a shot on a rooftop with a 15 mile per hour wind with your target at 500 yards away, that difference determines whether you make it or not.”

Ray sighed and picked up the gun. “I’ll do what I can, okay?”

“Great,” Nate clapped him on the back before walking out of the lab. “Thanks, man.”

               Zee was directly to his right as he walked out, but he didn’t say anything to her as left. A while ago, she wouldn’t have blamed him for it. But Nate had been giving her a cold treatment for weeks now, ever since the Cooper incident. She knew she had messed up bad, but she was trying to rectify her mistakes. However, he was still only speaking to her when it was necessary.

“You okay?” Ray asked, looking over at her.

“Yeah,” Zee nodded, glancing away from the computers she was running simulations on that Nate had assigned her to do. “Just wish I could go back in time and not help Cooper so half the team isn’t mad at me.”

“We all screw up,” the scientist replied. “You made the rounds and apologized. Besides, you’re back on our side one hundred percent.”

“Absolutely,” she said. “And I’ve been working hard. I don’t complain during training, I read all the things he gives me on SHIELD protocols, complete the simulations, everything. I even let Gideon put this internet nanny on me. What do I have to do to prove to Nate, and Rip too, that I’m not going to double cross him?”

Ray shrugged. “Give them a little more time?”

“Yeah, because that’s working,” Zee snorted. “They think like specialists. I wish I could just speak that same language as them.”

“Kinda like we do a bit?”

Zee grinned. “Well, you and Lily are practically psychically linked. You have this bond that’s so unbreakable. It’s hard to imagine one of you without the other.”

“Well, we have been working together practically since we started at SHIELD,” Ray admitted.

Zee noticed he was blushing a little and smiling as he said this. Did he really not see how into Lily he was?

The doors opened, and Lily walked into the lab. “I’m back with blood.”

“Gross,” Zee wrinkled her nose.

“It’s for Gideon’s doctors,” Lily explained, her eyes falling to the Icer pistol. “Still problems with it?”

“According to Nate, it’s an ounce too heavy,” Zee piped up.

“Ugh,” Lily groaned. “He always has a problem with something.”

She then stood on her tiptoes to look taller and planted her hands on her hips. “I’m Agent Nate Heywood, and I can take out six men with a plastic spoon. As long as my hair looks good.”

Zee threw back her head and laughed. “That’s just what he’d say!”

“With the amount of product he seems to put in his hair, it wouldn’t shock me if he has said that,” Lily giggled as she got off of her tiptoes. “But some agents are really picky about their weapons. Yesterday, Rip asked us to modify the handle of his Icer because it didn’t fit right against his ring and pinky fingers.”

“Okay, I can kinda understand that one.”

“Yeah,” Ray agreed. “Hey, I can actually do an impersonation of him.”

“Oh yeah?” Zee folded her arms. “Let’s see it.”

Ray straightened up. The smile disappeared off of his face and he narrowed his eyes. He actually looked a little scary.

It took a few seconds before Zee got it. A wide grin stretched across Lily’s face as it clicked with her too. The two of them began to laugh, and soon Ray broke his impression to join in.

“Can either of you do Gideon?” Zee wheezed as she held onto the table for support.

“Never tried,” Lily said at the same moment Ray answered with a ‘nope’.

“Hold on,” she instructed, slowly letting her laughter die before crouching down and opened her mouth.

Before she could get a word out, Gideon herself entered the lab. Zee straightened up, banging her elbow on the table.

“We’re landing soon,” she told them. “Be ready to be on the road.”

* * *

 

               A few hours later, the team had returned from the investigation site with a body bag holding their victim. His body had been levitating in the air until Lily got close to him, and a jolt of static electricity between the two of them had sent the body falling down onto the ground. Zee had done her research on him once they were back on the Waverider, finding no motive for any foul play. Nate had ordered her to research again after telling her no one was clean the first time around. On her way down to the lab, Gideon had lectured him about letting himself forgive Zee for what she’d done. It was in the past, Zee was committed now, and the last thing she needed was a divided team.

“Any news on the body?” she asked as she entered the lab.

Lily had the victim’s body laid out on the Holotable, where she had been performing an examination. “Some.”

Gideon noticed Ray was missing and turned around to see him outside of the lab. “How come Raymond’s not with you?”

“Ah,” Lily pressed her lips together for a moment. “He, well, you see…”

“He’s afraid of it, isn’t he?”

“It’s the smell really,” Ray called out, his voice somewhat muffled since he was outside the enclosed lab space.

Lily shook his head. “Ray, being afraid of death is perfectly natural. It happens to all of us at some point.”

“Yeah, but we had a rule about bringing dead things into the shared lab space,” he argued. “Remember the cat?”

Gideon frowned as Lily rolled her eyes. “Not the stupid cat again.”

“Yes, tell Gideon about that cat!”

“Ma’am, it’s nothing, it was a misunderstanding-”

“Lily, you left the liver next to my lunch!”

“Timeout, children!” Gideon shouted, holding up her hands in a timeout signal. “Lily, what have you found out about the body.”

“Well, this death was not caused by anything manmade,” Lily explained, pulling up an image of the man’s brain. “His brain has been fried to a crisp. Judging by the severity of it, he must have been hit by two thousand megajoules of electrostatic electricity.”

“What?” Gideon murmured, shaking her head. “That’s twice the power of a lightning bolt. I don’t even know of anything on the Index capable of this.”

“I don’t know either,” Lily agreed. “But there’s got to be something else in the body that can indicate what lead up to his death. I might have to dig a little deeper.”

“Do what you have to,” Gideon instructed.

“It’s happening again!”

“It’s science, Ray! I have to dissect something!”

“Okay, yes, but that’s not what I’m talking about,” Ray held up his tablet against the glass of the lab door so Gideon could see the map onscreen. “It’s another electrostatic event.”

Gideon hurried over to the doors and exited the lab so she could speak to Ray face to face. “Where?”

“About twenty miles away. The signature keeps increasing.”

“Run and get Rip and Nathaniel down here,” Gideon instructed, then turned back to Lily. “See if you can figure out anything else with the body.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

* * *

 

               Gideon, Rip, and Nate arrived at the location of the signal, an old barn next to a farmhouse, only to have Ray report that it had vanished. When they opened up the bar doors, another body was found floating in midair. Once they had an identification on the victim, Zee drew the connection that both victims worked at the same volunteer fire station, which had sent a truck to New York after the Dominator invasion. The trio then went to the fire station to investigate, suspicious that whatever killed those firemen could have extraterrestrial origins. It was practically confirmed that the firemen were in trouble when another electrostatic reading starting to pick up at the station.

               Nate and Gideon had talked to the firefighters while Rip explored their station, eventually finding a Dominator arm blaster from New York in a case in the break room. Gideon interrogated one of the firefighters who had been cleaning the arm blaster with the two other victims a few nights before. Lily determined that an alien virus from the Dominators had been on the blaster, but then transmitted to the firemen while they’d cleaned it. The third fireman had died after those at the station were evacuated to a safe distance so the electrostatic wave wouldn’t harm them. SHIELD came in then for clean-up, Lily was tasked to find a cure for the remaining firefighters if their blood tests came back positive for the alien virus, and the arm blaster was put on the Bus for transport to the Sandbox.

“Are we really taking this with us?” Zee asked as she watched the crate containing it brought towards the Waverider. “It killed three firemen.”

“We’ll be fine,” Gideon assured her. “None of us have tried to clean it or even touched it like they did. We’ll get it there, and then we’ll move onto our next assignment.”

Zee pressed her lips together and followed after Ray and Lily.

* * *

 

Gideon entered the lab to see Lily staring at blood cells on the big screen behind the Holotable. “You said you had a breakthrough?”

“Uh-huh,” Lily nodded eagerly. “Look at this.”

Gideon stepped closer and noticed something else amongst the red blood cells. “Is that-”

“The virus,” Lily nodded. “These are the samples from the firefighters who died. The Dominator virus is still active inside them. It’s just waiting to be passed onto its next host. It’s propagative.”

“It moves from person to person,” Gideon murmured as Lily walked around the table to retrieve something. “Do you know what kind of contact is responsible for the transfer of the virus.”

“Not yet,” she shook her head. “I’m working in uncharted territory since the virus has alien origins. But the things we could learn from this could possibly lead to new developments in human medical endeavors. It’s completely fascinating!”

               As she said this, a pair of tongs used for grabbing test tubes began to levitate in the air behind Lily. Gideon sucked in a soft breath as she remembered how a frying pan and other metal objects had begun to rise in the air with the last fireman as the virus started to take his life in the end. Then she recollected how there had been a shock of static electricity between Lily and the levitating body of the first fireman at the campsite. The pieces of the puzzle quickly assembled as Lily continued to ramble on, oblivious to the floating tongs.

Gideon began to back out of the lab. “Lily.”

“Ma’am?” Lily raised an eyebrow. “Is everything okay?”

“The virus…it’s transmitted through static electricity,” Gideon told her, activating quarantine mode and sealing the doors of the lab per SHIELD protocol. “I’m so sorry.”

Lily stared at her before her eyes widened. She whirled around and gasped loudly as she saw the tongs hovering. Gideon watched as she extended a hand towards them, only to drawn them away as static jumped from her hand to them and sent them plummeting to the floor. The scientist looked utterly terrified as she took a step back.

“Oh no.”

* * *

 

               For the first twenty minutes after finding out that she was infected with a Dominator virus, Lily had sat against the doors of the lab with Ray on the other side. Gideon, Rip, Zee, and Nate were all discussing what they needed to do next. The path to the Sandbox had them right in the middle of the ocean, so there was no way to land and get her out of the plane to a safe distance. It would be four hours to get there, and she had two left at best based on the knowledge she had of how quickly the firemen died after contact with the blaster. No matter what they said outside the doors, the rest of the team was trapped in a death sentence with her.

Ray wasn’t saying anything as if he could sense she didn’t want to talk, so Lily was left with her own thoughts. She thought about her life so far and all the things she wanted to do, but now never could be able to do because she hadn’t been careful. If only she hadn’t gotten so close to the first body and treated the victim with more caution, then she wouldn’t have received the static discharge and never would have contracted the virus. Now she was going to die and bring the whole plane down with a static discharge that would kill also Ray and Gideon and Zee and Rip and Nate.

               After twenty minutes, Gideon approached the doors and told Lily that she couldn’t give up so easily. She had a drive to find a cure for this virus more than ever. Gideon said that she had faith in Lily that she could find a way to save herself. Ray had told her that he would help in anyway that he possibly could for her. Given she had around two hours to live, Lily figured it would be better to find ways that didn’t work rather than not trying at all.

Soon, Ray was giving her a delivery mechanism through some modifications to the lab doors so he could get her what she needed. “I think I have what you need.”

Lily didn’t say anything as he pushed the box over to her side and she took the taser-like device out.

“You know, it was a bit of a challenge to get that,” her best friend added. “It’s not exactly easy to find a mineralized solution that can suspend the vaccine and conduct electricity.”

“Could you not say vaccine?” she asked. “This is more of an anti-serum.”

She prepared her first attempt at the anti-serum as Ray watched through the glass. Her heart thudded against her chest, but Lily was able to keep her hands steady as she prepared the cure. Once she had the first trial loaded, she made her way over to the three rats that she and Ray had been allowed to bring on the Waverider. The one they’d named Manchego was the first one up.

“With the antibodies from the fireman’s brain cells,” she explained to Ray as though he was beside her and not on the other side of the doors. “The antigens of the virus can be targeted and neutralized, and that’s if alien viruses have antigens, but if they don’t-”

“Lily,” Ray said. “It’s okay. You’ll figure it out.”

She nodded and used the delivery device on Manchego. For a few tense seconds, she waited to see what would happen. Then there was a pulse of electricity, followed by the dead Manchego rising to hover in the air. Lily bit her lip and turned back towards the samples she’d gotten from the firefighters.

“At least we know one formula that doesn’t work?” Ray offered.

* * *

 

               Zee approached the door of the briefing room quietly. Inside, Nate was leaning against the Holocom to watch the surveillance of Lily working in the lab. A concerned expression had taken over his facial features. He probably knew she was watching him, being the super spy and all, but was still holding her at an arm’s length.

“How come you aren’t down there?” Zee asked finally.

“They don’t need an audience or any more pressure,” Nate replied.

Zee nodded and prepared to leave.

“Zee, if you want, you can stay.”

She turned back around and entered the briefing room. “I hate seeing this. Lily’s my friend, and seeing her like this makes me feel-”

“Helpless?” Nate supplied, and she nodded. “I feel it too. I was hoping it would be a person all juiced up with superpowers. I wanted it to be someone I could fight head-on, someone that could be hurt or punished. At least then I could do something then.

Zee noticed his tone got darker as he kept talking, but then Nate sighed and shook his head. “Instead it’s a virus. It’s tiny and I can’t do anything to protect the team from it. I can’t see it or understand it. It makes me feel so useless.”

“There’s nothing we can do about it though,” Zee reminded him, crossing her arms.

“I know,” her SO nodded. “We just have to wait and get ready.”

A small chill ran down Zee’s spine. “What could we possibly get ready for?”

“For whatever it is that we are called upon to do,” Nate explained. “No matter what it is.”

She nodded her head and went back to watching Lily work on her cure. There was already one rat floating, so she had two more shots left at least at a cure. She approached a second rat and shocked it with something that looked like a taser. A few minutes passed and a smile started to creep across her face. Then there was a pulse of blue light, and Zee raised her hand to cover her mouth as the rat began to float up.

“I’ve been too hard on you,” Nate broke the silence between them. “Ever since Hewitt died.”

“Was wondering when you’d say something about that,” Zee muttered.

“I didn’t know how to handle being betrayed,” he told her. “I had no idea how everyone else would be reacting. I trusted you, then I didn’t want to trust you after you betrayed us. I didn’t want to see it as a mistake. I should have forgiven you sooner for it.”

“Got it,” Zee nodded. “So, you’re saying you see what I did now to be a mistake? What made you change your mind?”

“Because you showed you were truly loyal to SHIELD above Helix. If you were really loyal to Helix, you’d never have put that bracelet on, found a way to jam it, or run away from the team.”

“Is that what you would have done if you were a traitor?” Zee asked jokingly.

Nate chuckled lightly. “Something like that.”

* * *

 

Lily squeaked as she turned and saw one of Ray’s screwdrivers levitating in the air behind her before dropping to the ground.

“Hey, it’s okay,” Ray said from outside the doors. “Everything’s going to be fine.”

“Don’t,” Lily shook her head. “Just don’t, Ray. I see you checking your watch.”

“If you want, I could come in and help you out, make sure that this trial works and all.”

“I’m fine,” she snapped harsher than she intended to before grabbing the delivery mechanism. “Have you even made sure this thing works?”

Ray looked somewhat offended. “Of course it does, you’ve seen it! Besides, why would I give you something broken when your life in on the line. If anything, it’s your vaccine that’s not functioning…yet.”

“First off, it’s an anti-serum! And secondly, I’m wondering if you even calibrated this correctly.”

“It’s not the device.”

“How sure are you about that?”

“I know you’re upset, but you don’t have to take it out on me,” Ray retorted. “You were the one who wanted to see the world so much. You were safe in a non-mobile lab that was at a grounded SHIELD facility. Then Gideon came along and recruited us. You wanted to travel and have adventure, I said this was the perfect opportunity, and then we both decided to do it.”

“We should have listened to Smith,” Lily huffed. “He warned us it was a bad idea to take the offer when we told him we planned to.”

“I thought if it came to it, we could protect each other!”

“Protect each other?” Lily scoffed and shook her head. “How could we do that? We didn’t even pass our field assessments!”

Ray’s eyebrows knitted and he hesitated for a few seconds. “I don’t want to see you get hurt.”

“Well, it’s too late for that now!”

“No, I won’t believe that,” Ray shook his head again. “It’s been the two of us always. At the academy, at sci-ops, on this plane. You’ve been beside me the whole damn time, Lily. You’re one of the smartest people I know, you can fix this!”

Lily bit her lip and shook her head. “I-I don’t know.”

“No, you do! You just haven’t found-“

“I don’t know how!” she cried out, sniffling as she felt herself start to break. “The antibodies from the firefighters aren’t able to fight this virus. They aren’t strong enough because they didn’t have the time to develop enough immunity to an alien virus. I have nothing to create an antiserum from because there are no survivors from this aside from-”

“The Dominators,” Ray finished.

It was like the puzzle pieces arranged themselves into the big picture. Lily wiped her eyes and nodded. “The Dominator who wore the blaster had the virus and managed to be survive until the mass death-”

“-yet never emitted an electrostatic pulse because they were immune!” Ray started to smile.

“The alien who had it was immune,” Lily nodded. “They were just the carrier- the Typhoid Mary! Or Typhoid Dominator. That’s the key to this!”

“Maybe there’s some cells that can be scraped from the blaster since it was on its skin,” Ray said. “You can use those to generate a vaccine!”

“Anti-serum, but exactly,” she laughed. “Yeah, but I can’t get to them, I’m in quarantine!”

“I’ve got this,” Ray promised before he darted towards the staircase and ran up it. “Just hang on.”

Lily nodded to herself and exhaled slowly. She could do this. There was hope now. And even if it failed, she had a plan of what to do.

* * *

 

“Where is he- Ray, no!”

“Come back here with that!”

Ray ignored Nate and Gideon and kept running with the containment box that held the arm blaster. He had been apprehensive about having to transport the weapon after finding out that it had been responsible for the deaths of three people who had come into contact with it. However, he was all too grateful it was with them right now. This was what they needed to save Lily’s life.

As soon as he was down in the cargo bay, he pushed the code to open the lab doors up. Technically, the quarantine wasn’t supposed to be broken, but he didn’t care about that at the moment. Besides, the box was too big to put through the slot in the doors. As soon as he set it down, Lily whirled back around from where she was getting set up for the third trial.

“Ray, what are you doing?” she scolded. “You can’t be in here!”

“Too late now,” he replied, pulling on a pair of gloves. “Just…try to keep your hands off me.”

She cracked a smile. “Ray, are you sure about this?”

Ray nodded. “Of course I am. We’re going to do what we always do. We’re going to fix this- together.”

“Then let’s do it.”

               Together they worked side by side, with Lily being careful to not make contact with him in any way. At some point, the rest of the team came down to observe their process. Ray barely paid attention to him. All he could think about was making sure that this attempt would be the one that saved her. Time was running out for Lily, so there was no room for error.

               Finally, they had their cure. Ray loaded the cure into the delivery unit and passed it over to her. Through the window, he could see Zee chewing her thumbnail as she watched them. Lily reached into the cage and picked up the last rat, Cheddar.

“Third time’s the charm, right?” he murmured before she delivered the cure to the rat and set it back down in the wood shavings.

               The two of them stepped back. Cheddar continued to wander about his little space, his nose sniffing the air. It looked like he was going to be okay. On the other side of the glass, Zee started to smile and Nate looked relieved. Ray looked over at Lily, who looked like she was about to start crying of happiness. They had actually managed to do it.

Then there was a flash of blue, and Cheddar joined Manchego and Gorgonzola in the air.

Everyone’s faces fell instantly.

“No,” Ray whispered.

               Lily stepped away from him to walk toward the glass. Ray turned back to what they had done so far, his head down. Sound suddenly became muted to him. The normal hum of the electronics in the lab was dulled to his ears now. He faintly heard Lily requesting to Gideon to tell her father first so he could break the news to her mother.

               This wasn’t something he could wrap his head around. He knew the facts that Lily was dying from an alien virus, but it didn’t make sense to him. She had been by his side for long now. They were brilliant on their own, but unstoppable together. It wasn’t fair that this was how it was ending. There was still so much more that she had wanted to do, that they had both wanted to do.

“Can I have a moment alone with Ray please?” Lily’s voice rang out, clear as a bell.

Ray felt himself snap from the haze. They could still pull this off perhaps. Maybe they could get this one right immediately.

“I think we can figure it out with one more try,” he said, taking what they had left of the third trial back to work with it. “Did you think the electrostatic pulse seemed lesser than with the other two? It looked that way to me. Maybe we just need to calibrate the antiserum a touch and we’ll have it.”

“You said antiserum,” Lily sniffled behind him. “You finally got it right.”

“Heh,” he chuckled. “Yeah, I did.”

“I’m sorry, Ray.”

Something struck him in the back of the head hard. He felt pain explode in the back of his head. Ray sunk down to the floor, feeling woozy. The last thing he saw before his eyes closed was Lily standing over him, a fire extinguisher in her hands.

* * *

 

               She had never wanted Ray to be around for this, but then he had forced his way into the lab to help her. Lily hadn’t wanted to do this to him. He was her best friend after all. Yet it was because he was her best friend that she had to do this. She would not let him be burdened with watching her die.

               Letting the fire extinguisher drop to the floor, she walked to the lab doors and opened them. The rest of the team was still upstairs, probably waiting for Ray to call them back down. It hurt that she wouldn’t get to say goodbye to Zee or Gideon or Rip or Nate. At least they’d be safe though. None of them would have to put a bullet in her.

               Lily walked past Lola as hot tears began to trace their way down her cheeks. Her hand reached out, tempted to touch the car Gideon loved in a small act of rebellion, but she pulled back at the last second. Instead, she just kept walking toward the control panel. She pressed the switch that would open the cargo door.

               As it began to open, Lily knew she only had a minute or so before the team figured out what was going on and came running. She needed to be gone by then for their safety. Staring out at the blue sky and the puffy white clouds, the scientist gazed out at it as the buzzing in her ears grew louder. Even though the sky was beautiful, she wished it was nighttime. She would have liked to have died seeing the stars.

               She walked to the edge of the ramp once it was down. Her legs shook as she neared the edge. By some force, Lily found herself looking behind her at the lab. Ray was awake now, trying to open the doors. He was screaming something at her as he tried to open them, but she couldn’t hear it. Seeing his distress and knowing he was about to see her die despite her best efforts made her cry more.

“I’m sorry,” she murmured.

Then the wind pulled her from the edge she stood upon.

So began the fall of Dr. Lily Stein.

* * *

 

               Nate had been with Gideon and Rip in the briefing room when the alarms began to go off. Zee had taken refuge in her bunk after they’d gone upstairs to give the sunshine twins time to say goodbye. Gideon was refusing to speak to the head agent at the Sandbox and in the middle of giving Rip an excuse for why she couldn’t give an update when they all realized that the cargo bay doors were lowering. Nate had a feeling what was happening immediately and broke into a run towards the back of the plane. Any other mission would have seen him just leaving the poor soul to die, but he needed to look out for the team on this one.

               He practically leapt down the stairs to the cargo bay. The doors were open and Ray was fumbling to get a parachute on while holding the taser-like device he and Lily had been using on the rats. The other half of the sunshine twins was nowhere in sight, confirming his thoughts on what Lily had done. At this point, Ray, a scientist with no experience in jumping with a parachute, wouldn’t be able to reach Lily in time.

“Ray!” Nate shouted as he ran over to him.

Ray looked back at him frantically. “She jumped! The cure worked but she jumped!”

Nate grabbed the parachute and the delivery mechanism from him. Quickly, he strapped it on before leaping out over the edge of the Waverider. Wind rushed past his face as he realized there was going to be no ground to land on. Not only was he going to have to save Lily, but also keep her alive until they got a rescue.

* * *

 

It took Lily ten seconds to realize she didn’t like falling.

               As she hurtled towards the ocean beneath her, the buzzing kept growing louder. The Waverider was completely out of sight now. She wondered how much longer it would be before she finally succumbed to the virus. Would she be hovering in the air at spot where the pulse would leave her, or would she just hit the water? With a whimper at the thought of her impending death, Lily closed her eyes for a moment.

               When she reopened them, Lily saw Nate shooting towards her. Once he finally reached her, she could see the delivery mechanism in his hand. He zapped her leg with it before grabbing onto her. Lily tried to scream for him to let her go, but then she noticed the buzzing was fading away. The cure had actually worked, although she felt a little sleepy now.

               Nate pulled the parachute, and the two of them had their fall slowed. Lily wrapped her arms around him so she wouldn’t fall. He also adjusted his grip on her to ensure the same thing as a pulse left her body. Try as she might to stay awake, she passed out.

The water of the ocean hitting her face was what it took to wake her up.

* * *

 

               Zee paced back and forth in her room. They had landed at the Sandbox about an hour ago. Lily and Nate had been fished out of the ocean by SHIELD agents and taken to the base for a medical evaluation, which both passed with flying colors. The two had been released back to the Waverider half an hour ago, but Gideon had taken them straight to her office first. Zee had heard her shouting briefly earlier.

               She’d been staying with Ray ever since Lily had thrown herself out of the plane. The scientist had been an inconsolable mess until they received word from Nate that Lily had been given the cure and both of them were alive. After that, he’d been anxious to see her again. Zee couldn’t really fault him there. Even though she hadn’t known Lily for as long as Ray had, she still had a friendship with the other woman.

Finally, she heard something in the distance.

“Because I’m Agent Nate Heywood, and I jumped out of a plane without checking if my parachute was on properly,” Nate’s voice said in a mocking imitation of himself. “And my hair still looks good.”

               Lily’s laughter drew Zee to leave her bunk and start down toward Gideon’s office. She walked toward Nate and Lily as the latter asked him how much product he was even putting in his hair. A smile cracked at Zee’s lips as she listened to their banter. As she came closer, Nate looked over Lily at her. The scientist turned around, noticing that they were no longer alone.

“Hey, Zee,” Lily greeted quietly.

               Zee walked quickly towards her and embraced her. There was a slight noise of surprise from Lily before she hugged her back. Tears were pooling in the hacktivist’s eyes as she gripped her friend. She hadn’t spent very long on the plane or even in SHIELD, but she’d never felt a connection to so many people before. Lily, Ray, Gideon, Nate, and even Rip all had come to mean something to her and for the first time in years, she wasn’t afraid of caring for them.

“I’m so glad you’re okay,” Zee whispered. “Don’t do that to us again.”

Lily nodded against her. “I’ll try not to.”

* * *

 

“I was close to doing it-”

“I know you were.”

“I really was,” Ray nodded quickly as he gripped the pillow in his lap. “I mean- I had it all. The antiserum worked and there was a parachute. I just couldn’t get the straps on. I knew I should have taken that refresher session before we got on the plane.”

“Ray,” Lily put her hand on his shoulder. “It’s okay.”

“Although Nate does know what he’s doing, since he’s a specialist and all that,” he sighed. “He has more experience. He went all James Bond to get to you. I’m sure if I could have done that whole show for you.”

“Ray, stop talking.”

“Sorry,” he winced. “I was worried about you so much early and it’s still kind of in my system.”

“It’s okay,” Lily assured him. “Yes, Nate did something amazing while also incredibly risky. But the person who was by my side in the lab searching for a cure and running to get the Dominator blaster to me wasn’t him. Nate wasn’t the one who stayed and gave me hope when I was ready to give up. That was all you, Ray.”

He turned towards her. “Yeah?”

“Yeah,” she nodded. “You’re the hero, Ray.”

“Thanks, Lily.”

She leaned over and kissed him on the cheek. “I’m going to head to bed. Good night.”

“Night,” he said as she left his bunk.

Once she was gone, Ray touched his cheek where Lily had kissed him and smiled.

**Author's Note:**

> And there you have it!
> 
> I believe the next time, you'll be getting some good Timeship moments. And there might be something during LoT Ladies Week.
> 
> Reviews=Love.


End file.
